Shot of the week

One of the great things about Flickr Groups is that they push you to go out and take pictures when you might otherwise think “Nah, I can’t be bothered today”.

This week was one such case in point.

I’m a member (in fact a moderator) of the 52 Weeks : The 2015 Edition group. The aim of this group is to give members a theme every week and have them go out and shoot something related to the theme during that week – not using archive photos, pictures have to be taken during the actual week of the theme. The theme this week was “On The Way Home” which should be really easy, but a combination of weather and other things meant I was running out of time to get a shot by the Wednesday night deadline.

Driving home last night (Wednesday) I went past a field that I’ve photographed before, most of the time I would have just driven on past but knowing I needed a shot for the week I turned the car around and drove back. I always have my Panasonic TZ60 and Powershot G10 (infrared conversion) in my briefcase so was ready to shoot something.

The creative modes on the TZ60 are a feature I love – especially the black and white ones – and so I took a number of shots with the Dynamic Mono and Creative Art options. On my way home I began thinking about what to do with the images and it occurred to me to blend two images together to get a dynamic b/w sky background with a vibrant coloured foreground.

There is a great feature with the TZ60 that although you take a jpeg image in the creative mode, the camera also saves an unedited Raw file. So all I had to do was open the b/w image and import it into Photoshop then import the full colour Raw file too and lay it over the top. After that it was simply a case of adding a layer mask and creating a gradient to keep the colour part at the bottom while retaining the dramatic sky. Getting the gradient in the right place was the trickiest bit!

If you’re not on Flickr, I would really recommend that you join. And if you are, get into some of the daily/ weekly/ monthly challenge groups, it’ll help to push you into taking more pictures more often – which is never a bad thing.